CubeApril
6 HN mentions · mentioned in 6 months, 2017–2024
0:19 · 533K views · Oct 5, 2016
A clip from Futurama's 'A Fistful of Dollars' where Fry and Leela discuss ads appearing in dreams. It satirizes advertising creeping into every part of life.
Posted as a joke or reference whenever a product starts showing more ads.
6 comments from Hacker News
Google and Meta seem to have no idea what's going on within their own advertising networks. Similarly to all the stories (with two currently in the front page of HN, eBay and PayPal) about algorithms that are just insufficient for the range of realistic scenarios these companies must deal with on a regular basis. It's merely the equation of profit outweighing customer service. Admittedly, they're working on a scale that's difficult to comprehend, but that shouldn't absolve them of aiding and abetting criminal use of their systems. Google's and Meta's profit motives are the base cause of this continuing escalation of the ubiquity and user-hostility (to put it mildly) of internet advertising. It's only been predictable for the last 20 years... [LINK] (first aired in March 2000) this video (April 1999)
Double dipping with adverts is the way. Amazon, Spotify, dropped them all after they started pushing adverts as well as getting their monthly cost. It's not new -- cable/sky TV was exactly the same (although sky one was the other way round - started with adverts, then added a subscription fee in 1993 [0]) The far bigger problem is that the majority of people accept adverts. They don't consider them a cost. Last time I got a yellow cab in New York it was adverts on a TV screen in the back. I get ubers if I need a cab now. The future of adverts was accurately predicted in idiocracy [1], and of course Futurama had comentary on this a quarter of a century ago [2] [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] this video
Advertising is potentially useful, it's the scale that's a problem. this video Like, "Every inch of the new park is covered in sponsor branding" is a problem, but "I had no idea that a store selling towels opened in our town" is also a problem. These are both advertising, at some point you cross from "I didn't know about that, thanks" to "Just fuck off already" and that's too much advertising. Dispepsi for example, the Negativland album, is premised on the idea that everybody on the entire planet already knows about Coca-Cola and Pepsi, so their continued advertising is entirely futile. Nobody who wants a brown fizzy beverage is unsure whether they could obtain such a thing or what it might be called. So all they're doing is annoying us.
Reminds me of Futurama's commentary on "Ads in the 20th century": this video "Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky." (And that was in 1999. The 2018 version would have to be extended: "And in our email, and in the Windows start menu, and in our phones, and on shopping carts and subway turnstiles, and maps, and video games, and in photo albums, and even inside of other ads. And the ads watched you as much as you watched them. But not our dreams.")
* Futurama - S01E06 - Didn't you have ads in the 20th century? - YouTube || this video Leela: "Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?" Fry: "Well sure, but not in our dreams! Only on tv and radio...and in magazines...and movies. And at ball games, on buses, and milk cartons, and t-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky. But not in dreams! No sirree."